The sun warms the Earth, making it habitable for people and animals. But that's not all it does, and it affects a much larger area of space. The heliosphere, the area of space influenced by the sun, is over a hundred times larger than the distance from the sun to the Earth.

The sun is a star that constantly emits a steady stream of plasma—highly energized ionized gas—called the solar wind. In addition to the constant solar wind, the sun also occasionally releases eruptions of plasma called coronal mass ejections, which can contribute to the aurora, and bursts of light and energy, called flares.

On Feb. 22, a lunar lander named Odysseus touched down near the Moon's South Pole and popped out four antennas to record radio waves around the surface—a moment University of Colorado Boulder astrophysicist Jack Burns hails as the "dawn of radio astronomy from the Moon."

It was a major achievement for the tenacious lander, which was built by the Houston-based company Intuitive Machines and had to overcome a series of technical difficulties to make it to the lunar surface. Burns is co-investigator on the radio experiment that flew aboard Odysseus called Radio wave Observations at the Lunar Surface of the photo Electron Sheath (ROLSES).

He'll give an update on the ROLSES data, and will share what's in store for future radio astronomy from the Moon, this week at the 244th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Madison, Wisconsin.

"It was heroic for Intuitive Machines to land under these conditions, and to deploy our antennas, take some data and get that data back to Earth," said Burns, professor emeritus in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at CU Boulder.